This statement of Mr. Cramp before the Lynch Committee, of which the foregoing is only a synopsis, was really the key-note to all subsequent argument in favor of government aid to American ship-building and ship-owning. It presented the matter in a new light, or a light which was new in 1870.
It might be remarked here, in referring to his statement that “the form of every plate must be sketched before it is ordered, etc.,” that Mr. Cramp himself was the originator of that system in this country, a system of ordering plates sheared to sizes at the mill. (See “American Marine,” W. W. Bates.) Until he established this innovation, plates for building iron vessels had been rolled as nearly as possible to the sizes required and then sheared and trimmed at the shipyard. This itself was a very remarkable and striking innovation, and was immediately taken up by all iron ship-builders in the country, and is now the universal practice.
The legislative result of the first effort of Congress to take cognizance of the condition of the merchant marine was the bill introduced by Mr. Lynch, February 17, 1870.
Mr. Lynch’s bill, although it may be described as the pioneer effort for the resurrection of the American merchant marine, proposed in concise form and plain, easily comprehensible terms, without any unnecessary verbiage or circumlocution, as practical and as sensible a system of subvention as has ever been put forward since. It was comprehensive in its scope, universal in its application, and liberal in its provisions. Later bills, more elaborately framed and more diffuse in their verbiage, have hardly improved upon the simple matter of fact form in which Mr. Lynch embodied his proposed policy.
This was the beginning of a Parliamentary war between American ship-owners on the one hand and the influence of foreign steamship companies on the other; a war which has at this writing lasted more than thirty years.
One subsidy was granted by Congress at this early date, that of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company; but hardly had that subsidy begun to operate, when an exposure of certain methods by which it was procured brought about a great public scandal, which for the time-being put a peremptory end to the whole policy.